Sunday, 21 July 2013

Elderly Hong Kong Man Finds Out He Is a Woman

In what may be one of the most surprising diagnosis in medical history, a 66-year-old Vietnam-born Chinese man was found to be a woman after all.

The shocking revelation would have remained undisclosed had it not been for the large ovarian cyst found in the patient’s swollen abdomen after a doctor’s visit in Hong Kong.

The patient’s condition, as reported by the Hong Kong Medical Journal, stems from two rare genetic disorders, one of which is Turner syndrome, characterized by stunted growth and reproductive sterility. The other condition, congenital adrenal hyperplasia, is attributed to abnormally higher levels of male hormones, resulting in masculine features in women, such as growth of a beard and the presence of a “micropenis.”

The patient, standing only 1.37 meters tall, having no testes, and with a childhood history of urinary leakage, still sees himself as a man, and considers the need for a possible testosterone replacement therapy.

The combination of both syndromes in one person is so rare that only six cases ever have been documented.

Only one in about 2,500 to 3,000 females is diagnosed with Turner syndrome, in which affected women have only sone X chromosome instead of two, or have part of the other X chromosome missing. Men, on the other hand, have a pair of X and Y chromosome.